


let the walls break down

by sirens (adarkalleyway)



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, alex just be feeling things, set in '94, yes i made luke write in '94 one of my favorite love songs from 2009
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:01:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27204908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adarkalleyway/pseuds/sirens
Summary: Once Alex started realizing things, it was very hard to stop. It's hard to trust your gut when your gut keeps twisting around your insides with every move.
Relationships: Alex/Luke Patterson (Julie and The Phantoms)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 112





	let the walls break down

**Author's Note:**

> this is dedicated to my best friend zaca who is the best beta reader of all time. go check out his jatp fanart at youresogreat.tumblr.com/tagged/my-art !!!

For a man who had been running around in his own head like a goldfish in a tank for seventeen years, Alex sure did know how to avoid thinking about a subject. 

And he did, he had been doing so since the day at age sixteen that something clicked in his head when he distracted Luke from his notebook and saw him look up and focus his eyes back on the real world: that was the moment he realized he could see straight into the universe behind those eyes, and that he loved it a bit more than he thought before. If he remembered hard enough, he could tell you they stared into each other's eyes for exactly six and a half seconds. He could also tell you the color of the guitar pick Luke was holding between his teeth, and the exact pitch of the breath he let out as he left the world of his songwriting and fell back into the real world, in the garage, with Alex.  
  
_"Sorry,"_ Alex had said.   
  
_"It's okay, it was getting too wordy already anyway,"_ Luke had replied. And Alex loved how Luke never made him feel bad for interrupting.   
  
Alex went home that day with his inner monologue raging, as if he could talk himself into unrealizing what he had just realized. After he crashed down from the blow to his heart that realizing he was in love had been, he closed the garage door and told himself he could never, ever allow a sign of it to show. He knew he liked boys already, but having figured that out hadn't prepared him for this. He could like boys, sure, as long as his parents didn't find out, as long as he didn't involve his friends in his love life, he had told himself- he didn't want to put anybody in an uncomfortable situation. Alex couldn't stand to be the reason other people were upset. It was exhausting enough to pick at the inside of his own mind- he couldn't go around picking at everyone else's.   
  
So for the following year, Alex didn't allow a single bit of love to accidentally spill out in one of his looks. If he felt butterflies flying around his stomach when Luke caught his eye in the middle of a song, he would digest them. And continue playing. He couldn't allow himself to miss a beat.   
  
It was easier than he figured it would be, Alex repeated to himself every day, trying to say it louder than the little voice in his head that screamed that no, it really wasn't.  
  
\----------  
  
It got harder over time. That voice in his head got louder every time Luke cheered on himself under his breath while trying to figure out a chord progression, and every time he sung a new song out loud and let it all out, visibly happy from feeling it come to life. Every day, Luke grew more and more into the hardest person in the world to not love. 

  
And times changed, too. Sure, not much had changed in their life in the past twelve months, hard as they tried to break into the local punk scene. But times had changed for Alex when he gathered every bit of courage he could muster and told his parents he was gay. He had tried not to expect too much of an utopic outcome, so his mother's tears and his father's accusations of destroying their peaceful, loving family didn't come as a complete surprise.   
  
It didn't make it any less of a stab to the heart, though.   
  
\----------  
  
It was Luke who had taken him in that day. He didn't know where else to go, or rather, he didn't know where else he would want to go. He needed one precise person, and that person opened the doors to his newly acquired garage for him, and held him while he cried, and shut him up when he dared to even think that his father might have been right.   
  
Luke didn't even give him a chance to feel the slightest bit unloved.  
  
\----------  
  
Alex wrote his first song that weekend. He never showed the band - that song would remain in the front pocket of his favorite jacket forever. But the time he spent sleeping in Luke's old couch, while Luke himself insisted on sleeping on a comforter on the floor, awakened something in him that had definitely not been there before: hope.  
  
He didn't know whether he was fooling himself every time he caught Luke's eye and it felt like Luke had already been staring at him. He used to take his mind somewhere else every time he felt Luke smile at him for a little too long, reminding himself that Luke was a naturally sweet guy, and he would obviously smile at his friend without it carrying any other underlying meaning. But it got harder during his stay at the garage, because that little voice in his head kept screaming that it had become too frequent to be a coincidence.   
  
\----------  
  
Alex had a fantastic memory. It was rhythm practice, he supposed, or the years of rehearsing his words before engaging in any kind of conversation, but he had a way of remembering things that came as naturally to him as breathing. So he had reached into this reliable part of his brain for stability in a moment as important as this: he trusted himself not to forget a single word in the speech he had been rehearsing in his head all morning, while Luke was off serving frozen yogurt in a teal uniform.   
  
_"Dude! I've been waiting all morning to get here and-"_ Luke began, before even saying hi, the second he opened the garage door. But Alex couldn't afford to let him start on an idea, because then he wouldn't have the guts to stop him, and Alex really needed to be the one to speak.   
  
_"Stop,"_ he almost-screamed, and the urgency in his voice shocked Luke into forgetting his train of thought immediately. And so he let it out.   
  
_"I have to tell you something very important."_ He could tell by the look in Luke's eyes that he had absolutely no idea of what was coming, so he looked away, so that he wouldn't get too tangled in Luke's mind before speaking his own. _"I hope I'm not being insane right now, even though I sound insane, I could swear I'm not but I'm going to regret this if I am. Luke, I hope you're thinking the same I'm thinking when you look at me when we're jamming, or just talking, because I know I couldn't stand it if you started looking at me differently-"_  
  
_"Alex,"_ Luke cut him off, with a nervous laugh. _"I already told you that I'm okay with you liking boys."_ For the first time ever, Alex couldn't figure out what was going on inside the boy's mind.  
  
_"That's the point, man. I-"_ He took the deepest breath he had ever taken. _"I'm not talking about boys, I'm talking about... you. I- I like you, Luke."_  
  
He really hoped it was the deafening rumble of the blood rushing to his ears that didn't let him hear anything, because if Luke was really staying completely silent, Alex would have to start dealing with the regret that would immediately fill every inch of his body.   
  
So he waited for the blood to come down, he waited for his heart to stop beating so rapidly he could hear it and he was pretty sure everyone in a ten-mile radius could hear it too. But it never did. And he still didn't dare look up from his shoes and into Luke's eyes again. He couldn't stand the thought of seeing them tinted with the same pain and shame that he saw in his father's, he knew that he would regret it forever if he looked into his eyes and witnessed the doors to the infinite universe behind them close forever to him.   
  
So he never looked up. He just got up and left. He thought he barely heard Luke calling after him after he closed the garage door, but he didn't know whether he had imagined it or not, and he would rather not check. He ran, in the opposite direction that he had ran a week before, when he had temporarily moved into the garage. He ran home, and ran inside without even checking whether his parents were home or whether they cared that he had been gone. He closed the door to his room, and didn't plan on opening it again any time soon.  
  
\----------  
  
Alex knew he had to pick up the phone after the sixth or seventh ring. It was a privilege most of the time, having a phone in his bedroom to use whenever he wanted to without having his parents listen in on all of his conversations. But he knew that the alternative to picking up the phone and enduring a conversation through the line was having to face the talk in person, face to face with whichever of his friends dared to go look for him at his house. So he got up, picked the tube up from his nightstand and thanked the gods that the voice on the other side was Reggie's.   
  
_"Hello???"_ Reggie said dramatically, like he was trying to see into the other side of the phone by pushing it closer and closer to his face.   
  
_"Hi, Reg."_  
  
_"I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD."_  
  
Reggie was a drastic person, and Alex would appreciate the concern more if he could actually be sincere about the reasons for it.  
  
_"I'm not dead, Reggie, I'm-"_  
  
_"If you're not dead, I sure hope that this means that I'm seeing you at rehearsal today. You know, the one that was supposed to start an hour ago."_  
  
Alex remembered, he definitely remembered. What he didn't want to remember, though, was what had happened the last time he was in that garage a few days before.  
  
_"I'm not going to make it today, man. I- I'm sick, I'm coming down with something. You should... get on without me."_  
  
And just like that, he hung up the phone, like he hadn't made more embarrassingly clear the fact that he was avoiding the band, with no plans for the foreseeable future. He got back into bed.  
  
\----------  
  
Alex hadn't wanted to consider the worst-case scenario when planning for this. He could now no longer avoid the elephant in his own room- he spent every waking hour reliving the last few minutes before he irreparably shut down the gate between Luke and him forever. He hadn't wanted to think about the outcome in which everything came out wrong and he lost his best friend, possibly his only two friends, and his band. He knew the possibility existed, but he had trained himself for years not to worry before due time.   
  
So the blow hit full force when it became a reality. And now, he couldn't conceive an outcome where he could ever leave his house again. He disconnected the phone, forced his eyes closed, so the darkness would drown the little voice in his head that was now crying nonstop, and he could drift into sleep again.   
  
\----------  
  
He knew something was off when he got up to use the bathroom, but he couldn't put his finger on it just yet. Barely awake and wanting to keep it that way, not to think about the past week's events again, Alex crossed the hallway to the bathroom barefoot and keeping his eyes closed all but just a crack, enough not to walk blindly. It was barely morning, and the rain clouds from the night before hadn't completely moved on from his side of the sky, so the light coming in from the windows was pale and white and dewy, not bright enough to call sunlight, but bright enough to shine a little spotlight on the yellow post-it note on the floor, right by the door that led to his balcony.   
  
As if the clouds had cleared just that inch of sky on purpose to point his eyes to it, he noticed what was wrong with his bedroom: the note hadn't been there the night before, when he forced himself into sleep at no later than eight.   
  
His heart picked its fast pace back up again as he bent down to read it, and it didn't stop while he got dressed against the pull of his very own common sense and climbed the tree down the side of his house, landing on wet grass. There it was again, a company he had grown so accustomed to having that he didn't realize how much he had missed it until now: the little voice in his head, the one that reminded him that as hard as he tried and as strongly as he willed himself to, he could never choose to forget about Luke. It had come back to life the moment he recognized the little smiley face that Luke usually drew on anything he wrote, alongside his handwriting, on the little note on his carpet. And after almost a week of not allowing himself to have a single coherent thought, he couldn't do much to keep it from building his hopes back up again, and imagining a million possible ways this could result if he followed the instructions on the note:  
  
_Be at the garage, today at midday._  
_Please._  
  
Signed with the characteristic smiley face, which Alex couldn't stop himself from smiling back at, like the little straight-line ballpoint pen eyes were Luke himself's.   
  
\----------  
  
The air felt tight in his lungs the whole way. Alex knew he was putting himself back at risk, and he knew he couldn't let himself come out of this a coward and a loser again. And the moment that the garage door became visible from the front porch, an avalanche of thoughts rushed into his head. Seeing it again, the place where he last stomped down every bit of hope he had gathered, automatically drove a chill down his spine that froze him to the ground. There were no longer two forces fighting inside him, there now were a million of them. His head pulled on the opposite direction from his heart, and every single one of his nerves was pulling a bit to different directions, enough to braid his nervous system into a knot.  
  
He looked at the smiley face one last time. There was a decision he had to make, and he had to make it now and definitely. And if he had only looked a bit less carefully and a bit more forgivingly into his own heart, he would've known that the decision had already been made for him by a stronger force inside him, the very one that had made him walk over there in the first place. So he swallowed a dry gulp, and, without allowing himself a second (or rather third, or hundredth) thought, he took those last few steps and opened the garage door.   
  
It was familiar for him, seeing Luke sitting on the couch with his guitar, going over verses of a song. But this time, Luke stood up the second he walked in, as if he had been alert, and looked him in the eye, guitar hanging from its strap in front of his chest like a shield.   
  
_"Alex-"_  
  
_"I'm-"_  
  
_"No."_ Luke stopped him, putting his foot down. _"Don't apologize. Don't... let me-"_ Luke looked down and took his very own deep breath, like he was trying to keep the words in his head from slipping out of his ears.  
  
And, for lack of ability to keep those words in, he strummed his guitar and started singing.  
  
_Hey there, it's good to see you again._ Luke had always been way clearer when speaking above the rhythmic strum of a chord.  
  
_It never felt right calling this "just friends"_. Alex's mind took a second to process the words coming out of his mouth. It was as if every wire in his brain was fighting extra hard to connect to reality, trying to realize whether this was it or just another figment of his wild imagination.  
  
_I'm happy, if you're happy, with yourself._  
  
Alex was spinning. He couldn't have even imagined the look on his own face, because it was one he had never ever worn before. And Luke was walking to him, gaining confidence as he usually did while standing behind a guitar and speaking his mind in song.  
  
_Take off your shirt, your shoes, those skinny jeans I bought for you._  
_We're diving in, there's nothing left to lose._  
  
And it wasn't until they were eye to eye and Alex could see every single word, every single thought and star shooting through the universe that resided behind Luke's eyes again, that he realized that this was indeed real, that they were looking at each other the way Luke would look at him in his wildest dreams, the ones that left a taste in his mouth after he woke up.   
  
And through his eyes, he could see all the way down into his heart.  
  
_I'm gonna break down these walls I built around myself._  
_I wanna fall so in love with you_  
_And no one else could ever mean half as much to me as you do now._  
_Together we'll move on, just don't turn around._  
  
There were a million words hidden beneath the lines of the song, but every passing second reassured a starstruck Alex that there would be time, so much time to say every single one of them. Time to make up for, and time to figure out whatever this was that was sparking to life between them in that very moment, together.  
  
Right then, all Alex could do was allow Luke to drown the last words of the verse into a kiss much better than he had ever allowed himself to imagine.  
  
_Let the walls break down._

**Author's Note:**

> this was a breeze to write because i, too, am profoundly in love with luke patterson  
> song is walls by all time low!  
> (you can follow me on godbruno.tumblr.com !!)


End file.
